Science Fiction author and cartoonist Ray Nelson was the inventor of
the propeller beanie while still in high school. There are varying
versions of the story, but the gist is that, in 1947, at a small
science fiction convention in Cadillac, Michigan, Nelson and some
friends were cartooning, parodying science-fiction icons of the day,
and Nelson found some scraps of plastic and attached them to a hat.
Soon they became a proudly worn feature of the science fiction
crowd.
